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With Iraq's O.K., a U.S. Team Seeks War Pilot's Body

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A Pentagon team is on a secret mission to Iraq, searching the desert for the remains of the first American pilot downed in the Persian Gulf war in 1991.

The mission, undertaken with the approval of President Saddam Hussein, represents a small but potentially significant step in Iraq's attempts to end its deep isolation. Since the end of the gulf war, Iraq has been an international pariah, subjected to strict economic sanctions.

Though the mission is under the leadership of the International Committee of the Red Cross, it represents the first official visit of American military officers to Iraq since the war's end. American military and diplomatic officials acknowledged that the Iraqi Government had made a humanitarian gesture by allowing 11 American military officers to join 4 Red Cross officials on the search.

The search began this week in a remote section of western Iraq, where a Navy FA-18 fighter-bomber crashed on the first night of the gulf war nearly five years ago. The pilot, Lieut. Comdr. Michael Scott Speicher, 33, was the first American combat casualty of the war. He left a wife and two infant children.

Commander Speicher took off from the aircraft carrier Saratoga in the Red Sea on the night of Jan. 16, 1991, flying northeast toward Baghdad. Shortly after he entered Iraqi airspace, his plane disintegrated in midair. Navy intelligence officers were never sure why. They later concluded that he either had a freak midair collision with an Iraqi MIG-25 or that the enemy plane shot him out of the sky.

He crashed in a wasteland, far from civilization. Though Commander Speicher's status was changed from missing in action to killed in action in 1991, he remains the only American pilot downed in the war whose body has not been recovered.

In the fall of 1994, an American spy satellite photographed the crash site. Intelligence officials conveyed the images to the P.O.W./M.I.A. office at the Defense Department. Secretary of State Warren Christopher and Pentagon officials then approached the Red Cross, which has an office in Baghdad, and sought its help.

"This whole mission is a humanitarian effort," said Frederick C. Smith, Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for international security affairs. "The reason we undertook this was our commitment to determine the fate of all missing U.S. service members lost in conflict."

The Red Cross notified Iraq's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and on March 1 the Iraqi Government approved the request that a Red Cross team with Pentagon personnel be allowed to search the site. After months of haggling over details of the mission, final approval came last month. Defense Department officials said they believed the request was personally approved by President Hussein.

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American officials offered a very slight tip of the hat to Iraq today.

A State Department official called Iraq's decision "a positive humanitarian gesture." But he added: "They did the right thing, but they did it for reasons of self-interest. If they think it's the first building block in a grand edifice of better relations, they need to think again."

Representative Bill Richardson, a New Mexico Democrat who helped win the release of two Americans held prisoner in Iraq in July, said he had been discussing the mission with Iraqi officials since then. "Now, hopefully, they will start dealing more aggressively with other issues, such as the nuclear issue and human-rights concerns," he said.

Iraq's efforts to build weapons of mass destruction remain a sticking point with the United States and the United Nations.

With the go-ahead from Iraq in hand, 11 military officers gathered last week at the Army Central Identification Laboratory in Hawaii to prepare for the trip. The team, led by a forensic anthropologist, has conducted several expeditions in Southeast Asia to identify the remains of American servicemen missing in the Vietnam War. Using technologies including DNA identification techniques, high-gauge magnification instruments and computerized dental X-rays, such teams have identified missing servicemen using no more than a fragment of bone or tooth.

The team flew to Amman, Jordan, last weekend and crossed the border into Iraq, traversing the Amman-Baghdad highway and turning off into the desert toward the site, whose exact location remains a secret. They located the site through the Global Positioning System, a constellation of satellites that tells users precisely where they are on an electronic map of the world.

The team made camp and began staking out the site, spreading out in a radius of a mile and a half from the point of impact. Commander Speicher's jet was traveling at several hundred miles an hour when it crashed, and thousands of pieces of debris from the crash are scattered through the desert. Like archeologists on a dig, the searchers are sifting through the ground, looking for shards of metal and bone.

They are expected back in Amman on Friday. Pentagon officials said they were awaiting word on whether the mission was a success.

Commander Speicher lived in Jacksonville, Fla., where he grew up, went to high school and later taught Sunday school, near a base that is home to hundreds of Navy fliers.

A version of this article appears in print on December 14, 1995, on Page A00003 of the National edition with the headline: With Iraq's O.K., a U.S. Team Seeks War Pilot's Body. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe